In the Face of Persecution, How Do Christians Overcome?

In recent days I received several emails about the Obama’s faction’s plans to stigmatize their opponents as domestic terrorists. “John Carlin, the assistant attorney general for national security, announced Wednesday that the Justice Department is creating the new position of domestic terrorism counsel to combat the ‘real and present threat’ of domestic extremism.” Carlin’s remarks singled out the Southern Poverty Law Center as a source for credible information about this threat. The SPLC is notorious for its animus against conservatives, and in particular Christian individuals and groups broadly opposed to the Obama faction’s assault on Constitutional rights and principles.

It is more than likely that the new position Carlin speaks of will become a focus for systematic abuses of power under the rubric of national security like those which took place under the rubric of law enforcement at the IRS. Because the leadership in both wings of the elitist faction’s sham party system accept the false notion that national security requires and legitimizes wholesale disregard for Constitutional and/or unalienable rights, this move portends an era in which Executive branch abuses of power will be added to the already well advanced abuse of Judicial power. This will expand and intensify an ongoing Federal campaign of persecution intended to purge our nation of truly observant Christians, along with any and all others who refuse to submit to the Obama faction’s Communist-style government dictation of acceptable religious and political views.

Obama and his collaborators want us to believe that faithful Christians who will not depart from the moral convictions required by our faith, are for that reason a threat to America. Many decry this defamation of Christian character as an assault on Christians. Under the rubric of religious liberty, they are mounting a campaign to defend individuals and organizations against this assault. I applaud and support these efforts to stand by people like county clerk Kim Davis and the praying high school football coach Joe Kennedy. But when it comes to America’s political life, a good defense of Christians and other people acting in good conscience is not enough.

It is not enough defensively to decry the lie the Obama faction is deploying as a weapon against Christians and Christian moral principles. We must take the initiative to also speak and act in order to promote the truth about America’s way of life, and thus show up for what it is the lie about America and the real danger it faces, which Obama and his collaborators embody. That truth is clear: The fatal threat to America is the loss of Christianity, and the long campaign to sever our nation from its moral premises, which are rooted in the Christian understanding of the Creator, God.

The fatal threat to America is the abandonment of the understanding of God-endowed right and rights, including liberty, which God has made available to all. That understanding was made clear in and through Jesus Christ, even as it is written on the hearts of all who bear the title of humanity. It is intrinsic to God’s good intention for human existence. And it was, and must remain, the foundation, heart and soul of America’s decent character and way of life, or both its character and that way of life must perish.

We must take care lest the Christian response to the elitist faction’s increasingly clear intention to persecute people of Christian faith appears to be rooted in an altogether inappropriate, defensively selfish fear. Martyrdom became a byword for true Christian witness precisely because, in the full bloom of faith, the threat of persecution and death is not fearsome to the faithful. They trust in the Scripture’s repeated affirmation that being faithful unto death is the path to the crown of true life, beyond the shadow of all death.

Muslims praise their martyrs because they sacrifice themselves to murder innocent people. Yet for the sake of such abomination many of them die fearlessly. Christians seem to fear the crown of martyrdom, even though any self-sacrifice it may involve is not just a path to life for those wickedly slain, it can be the key affirmation of the true way of life that unlocks the hearts of those touched by it! The Graceful truth flows through Christian martyrs, a transfusion of the saving blood of Christ in the blood shed by all those through whom Jesus enacts His Father’s will for the salvation of humanity.

So the real concern ought to be with the fact a people that had lived in the prospect of light and grace are now being misled into darkness. The real preoccupation should be to bear witness, again and again to the words and logic that informed America’s birth and every instance of its true progress. In every case, they were words and logic spoken and acted upon by people of Christian faith. In following the logic of Christ, they became, as it were, the fingers of God’s goodwill, inscribing His rule into our nation’s heart, with the steady fervor of their faith and trust in Him.

Sadly, the deep corruption of our political life, fomented and encouraged by the elitist party sham, gives rise to the tendency to assume that obsessing about evil is the most effective way to move people in opposition to evil. This is because the elitist faction’s corruption is rooted in the denial of God– His reality, His power, His responsibility for the existence of all good things. But we should not fight evil with evil, but overcome evil with good.

Instead of preaching against persecution, we should act and speak boldly for truth- the truth of our faith; the truth that our nation’s liberty depends on the logic of God’s justice, as enacted by people being true to that faith, as were many who stood in good faith in previous generations of Americans. In the beginning they prayed for and relied upon God’s help. And then, in the course of their nation’s rising achievements, they repeatedly offered themselves to be God’s instruments, His helpers on behalf of humanity, which as a people we have come to represent.

We have let the enemies of God abuse the rhetoric of rights in a way that obscures the duty to God that is the true source and meaning of right. The waning of that sense of duty leads us to forget that right is defined by the exercise of freedom according to God’s will; the exercise of right as God gives us to see the right; the exercise of faith, trusting in the benevolent intention of God. This is what leads us to endure what the world sees as hardships and sacrifice, for the sake of the promise that His justice fulfills.

For God informed His law for the good of our nature. On that account, when we chose as a people to respect that law, our choice was as a prayer to God that the blessings of liberty would be the destiny of our nation. Now looms the tyranny and self-destruction that comes from the abuse of freedom. We will not overcome these evils by fearing and fighting against them. Rather we will overcome them by trusting in the obedient exercise of God-endowed right, as others have before us. By our good faith we’ll leave such evils in the dust, as God again inspires us toward our true home, a place and way of life that is not just here and now, or for ourselves alone, but for all the people of goodwill who meet with us through Christ along His way.

Author

Once a high-level Reagan-era diplomat, Alan Keyes is a long-time leader in the conservative movement. He is well-known as a staunch pro-life champion and an eloquent advocate of the constitutional republic, including respect for the moral basis of liberty and self-government. He has worked to promote an approach to politics based on the initiative of citizens of goodwill consonant with the with the principles of God-endowed natural right.

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